If the Republicans bring their national convention to Dallas in 2016, they’ll find a livelier, more interesting city than they visited in the summer of 1984.

They’ll find more to do than the old Six Flags and Southforkstandbys. They can visit new parks and concert halls and museums. They can be wowed by our fashionable new urban neighborhoods, A-list dining, light-rail system and a civic leadership that has evolved (somewhat) beyond the old country club surf-and-turf set.

If visiting media, as it inevitably does, brings up the Kennedy assassination, they will find less awkwardness and defensiveness surrounding the topic.

But repeat visitors, even from 30 years back, will probably recognize the place.

Reunion Tower, the world’s biggest Tootsie Pop, is still the skyline’s most familiar element. There will be preliminary bickering over how to pay for it all and hand-wringing over how to corral the protesters. There will be shuttle bus snafus.

Even the most obscure delegates will be invited to partake of catered barbecue at faux-Western hoedowns with ornamental hay bales and table decorations made out of cowboy hats.

As it was then, Dallas is still rather endearingly preoccupied with its own “world class”-ness. The traffic’s still awful, and it will be hot.

That other convention was a long time ago, but some of us have been around long enough to remember.

The Grand Old Party rode into town that summer on a tide of confidence and exuberance. It was a ripe slice of political history.

The popular incumbent Reagan-Bush (elder) team headed the ticket, with re-election virtually a foregone conclusion. A protester’s flag- burning sparked a Supreme Court case.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell was photographed riding a longhorn steer. Barry Goldwater was there. Routh Street Cafe was booked solid for a week, and the more daring among the delegates were urged to visit the Starck Club.

The most coveted invite in town was to a luncheon honoring FLOTUSNancy Reagan. Everybody wanted in, even though some attendees were reportedly taken aback by the “smut” in Joan Rivers’ entertainment monologue (“My idea of foreign affairs is a Motel 6 with Julio Iglesias!” Wacka-doo!).

A painfully green new-in-town kid reporter for the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, I witnessed none of these signal events. I didn’t rate credentials for the Dallas Convention Center, where the political business was headquartered.

Instead, my job was to follow around members of three state delegations and describe their activities in a daily quota of peppy little blurbs. By random assignment, I drew Arkansas, North Dakota and Kansas.

Arkansas was easy and fun. Its delegates — I recall them with genuine fondness — wore red plastic razorback hog hats everywhere they went. They brought a giant watermelon on a flatbed trailer. They registered enthusiasm with that soo-eee pig call.

North Dakota delegates, on the other hand, were virtually comatose. They didn’t throw big parties, and they went to bed early. They complained when convention organizers mixed them up with South Dakota.

Of the three, Kansas was the big deal. It was a discrete entourage, orbiting respectfully around its stars, reigning GOP power couple Sen. Bob Dole (who would go on to become the party’s 1996 nominee) and Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole.

Exciting stuff, but I met a lot of personal obstacles. My aged car overheated and died the first day. Too poor to rent a substitute, I fell back on a series of ragged old beaters borrowed from friends, each of which, in its own turn, also overheated and died.

Toward the convention’s end, on what I believe to have been the hottest single day of the 20th century, I attended a Kansas delegation shindig, rather oddly themed as a Polynesian luau.

This was in keeping with a long-standing Dole political tactic to serve pineapple juice to keep his name in the voters’ minds, even though he is unrelated to the fruit titans. It was a swanky party, and everyone who went got a fresh pineapple to take home.

My car that day was an ancient, enormous Buick Electra, the sort of thing midlevel mob bosses drove in the Age of Disco. After I left the party and was headed downtown to the newsroom, it overheated and died on a southbound lane of Central Expressway.

Thus was I initiated into the glamour of big-city journalism and national politics: standing by the freeway, waiting for a tow truck while my borrowed Buick backed up traffic for a mile, sweating under a merciless sun in my cheap suit and Payless pumps, clutching a pineapple.

Three decades later, I still pretty much feel like that same hopeless dork-with-a-pineapple most of the time.

But I have grown older and more seasoned. I have accumulated more stuff. I have acquired at least an outward veneer of confidence — perhaps in keeping with Dallas itself.